Divrei Torah

September 26, 2015

PDF: Ha’azinu Bruckner.pdf

Inscribing the book, singing the nose, tuning the ear, and turning the heart

I’d like to begin by situating The Song of Moses within two frames, one textual, the other experiential. Situated in the book of Deuteronomy, this parsha is inevitably framed by the High Holidays, by all that we’ve just read and sung through the Days of Awe (Yamim Noraim), all that we’ve experienced from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, from Kol Nidre to Neilah. With those services still ringing in our ears, the Biblical theology reflected in Moses’s song is constantly reframed through Rabbinic tradition and, for us at Dorshei Tzedek, by Reconstructionism as well. Just as the people stood ready to cross the Jordan into the promised land, we stand ready for a new start after a long journey. We’re reaching the end of Deuteronomy: this is the next to last parsha, the last one read on a Shabbat morning, since the very last one in Deuteronomy will be read on Simchat Torah. We’re reaching the end of the cycle of fall holidays that will culminate in Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. And we’re reaching the end of a year of reading the Torah in weekly installments (as per Moses’s command to remember the Teaching he’s been giving throughout the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy).

This parsha is located at the end of a long series of discourses in which Moses recaps for a new generation of Israelites the Exodus from Egypt and their desert wandering, along with the Teaching (Torah) he has passed on from God to the people who will enter the land that Moses himself will only view from a mountain top, as God reiterates at the end of this parsha. In last week’s parsha, Vayelech (chapter 31), Moses received final instructions regarding his death, Joshua’s assumption of leadership and the Israelites’ future in the promised land. His Teaching finished, Moses writes it down to be kept in the Ark as a witness. And God further commands him to write it as a song: “Now therefore,” says God, “write this song for yourself, and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths….” (Deuteronomy 31:19). The song itself follows in chapter 32, our parsha, its poetic stanzas shaped by parallel verses that describe Israel settled in the land, grown fat and happy, straying from God’s teaching, severely punished by its enemies until God takes pity on his people once again and wreaks havoc on those enemies who thought they acted on their own power rather than God’s alone.

The Song of Moses, Shirat Ha’azinu as it’s known from the opening word (“Give ear”), serves as a recap of the recap, gathering the major themes of Deuteronomy and the whole Torah. It’s a tune designed to tune into our ears like an earworm, a song for turning and returning. Mina Bromberg’s d’var Torah on Vayelech — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-minna-bromberg/write-your-own-song-parshat-vayelech-311-30_b_8147672.html (thanks to Linda Schiller for circulating the link!) — prepared this week’s by focusing on the role of song and the value of repetition when song, not simply words on the page, rings in our ears. She reminds us that Vayelech is read on Shabbat Shuva between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, its name taken from the opening verses of the haftorah from Hosea: “Return, O Israel, to Adonai your God.” Mina goes on to reflect:

These words? We’ve already read them. We read them every year. But have we turned them into song? Have we gotten them into our bodies and our mouths and our hearts so that our return to them is genuinely welcome and instructive? I’m not just talking here about literal singing. I’m talking about what singing has to teach us about the imperative to take what really matters to us and make it something we can carry in our very own bodies.

The conjunction of song, ears and hearts—that is the angle I’d like to pursue in my d’var Torah. I’m going to highlight just two aspects (proclaiming the name and singing with metaphors) to try to understand how the Song of Moses inscribes itself in us, how our bodies and minds become the book pictured throughout the High Holidays, the book in which we inscribe our deeds, the book of life in which we hope to be inscribed. At the end, I’ll invite you to respond: “have you been inscribed and to what effect?”

Consider first the song’s opening call:

Give ear, O heavens, let me speak;
Let the earth hear the words I utter!
May my discourse come down as the rain,
My speech distill as the dew,
Like showers on young grass.
For the name of the Lord I proclaim;
Give glory to our God!

The Rock!—His deeds are perfect,
Yea, all His ways are just;
A faithful God, never false,
True and upright is he. (32:1-4, in Etz Hayim)

With heaven and earth as witness, Moses will proclaim God’s name (32:3)—a phrase that should remind us of the name God earlier proclaimed after Golden Calf incident when Moses needed God’s assurance in order to lead this stiff-necked people:

“compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin—yet not remitting all punishment, but visiting the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations.” (Exodus 34:6-7)

We have just repeated this familiar phrase—known as the thirteen attributes—to hypnotic effect throughout the High Holiday services, especially in the final moments of Yom Kippur’s Neilah—but each time without the final phrase on punishment not remitted. Throughout the High Holidays, as Rabbi Toba reminded us, we are assured of forgiveness even as we acknowledge our sins and ask for forgiveness. The gates remain open, even as they close in the excitement of Neilah. Punishment is promised and already pardoned, even as we struggle to turn and return. We are assured of future failures and failings, we are only human—that is, capable of starting again anew.

It is that work of editing, the frame provided by the liturgy, that sings in us even as we “give ear” to the terrible punishments described in the Song of Moses. Please sing it with me:

Adonai Adonai El Rachum VeChanun; Erech appayim VeRav chesed VeEmet;
Notzer chesed laalafim; Noseh avon VaFeshah VeChata’ah VeNakeh

אֱמֶת חֶסֶד וְרַב אַפַּיִם אֶרֶךְ וְחַנּוּן רַחוּם אֵל יְהוָה יְהוָה  

וְנַקֵּה וְחַטָּאָה וָפֶשַׁע עָון נֹשֵׂא לָאֲלָפִים חֶסֶד נֹצֵר

If we remember, if we inscribe our selves, the song and its rhythm of forgiveness continue to echo in our ears.

And speaking of ears, let me segue to the second aspect I promised to explore with you: the song’s metaphors of anger and protection. My reflections are inspired by Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God, a short book I highly recommend that describes her encounter with the Bible in English translation, so different from the Hebrew Bible she grew up with. Especially relevant here is her discussion of Hebrew’s use of body parts as metaphors and prepositions, and most particularly, the metaphor of the nose (often used as a synecdoche for the face—the part for the whole). In the Song of Moses, the nose signals anger, which we can see in Robert Alter’s translation (though not in Etz Chayim which follows a tendency of translators to leave out the literal body part and pass directly to an explanation of the metaphor through translation):

The Rock your bearer you neglected
you forgot the God who gave you birth.
The Lord saw and He spurned,
from the vexation of His sons and His daughters.
And He said, “Let me hide My face from them,
I shall see what their end will be.
For a wayward brood are they,
children with no trust in them.
They provoked Me with an ungod
they vexed Me with their empty things.
And I, I will provoke them with an unpeople
with a base nation I will provoke them.
For fire has flared My nostrils
and blazed down to Sheol below” (32:18-22, in The Five Books of Moses)

Alter comments on the image of God presented: an angry warrior God who hides His face. The flared nostrils bespeak the common association of anger, wrath and fire, represented here by a nose burning with rage.

By contrast, in the thirteen attributes, God’s name includes erech apayim, literally “long noses” (note the plural), that is, noses that do not flare with anger; noses so long, they’re a very slow burn. God’s long noses show forbearance and compassion. That long-nosed, compassionate God appears in Moses’s song in another metaphor: the eagle who tenderly protects his nestlings.

He found him in a desert region,
In an empty howling waste.
He engirded him, watched over him,
Guarded him as the pupil of His eye.
Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings,
Gliding down to His young,
So did He spread His wings and take him,
Bear him along on His pinions;
The Lord alone did guide him.
No alien god at His side.

He set him atop the highlands,
To feast on the yield of the earth;
He fed him honey from the crag,
And oil from the flinty rock,
Curd of kine and milk of flocks;
With the best of lambs,
And rams of Bashan, and he-goats;
With the very finest wheat—
And foaming grape-blood was your drink. (32:10-14, in Etz Chayim)

We find the same image in Psalm 91, which reminds us that the Song of Moses, like Psalms, belongs to the oldest parts of the Bible, older than the book of Deuteronomy.

O you who dwell in the shelter of the Most High
and abide in the protection of Shaddai…
He will cover you with His pinions;
you will find refuge under His wings;
His fidelity is an encircling shield. (Psalm 91:1-5)

Moses’s song is filled with images of God’s power: God as rock appears repeatedly, the image inscribing itself through repetition in our ears and hearts. The Rock protects as well as destroys. Will the nose be short or long? Which song sings in our bodies? Will we remember?

Before I turn the discussion over to you, let me point out that the image of memory as inscription finds its metaphorical source for ancient and medieval people in the act of inscribing clay or wax tablets. Modern neuroscience has taught us that memories are not stored as ready-mades; nor are its images like photographs. Each time a familiar cue refires the synapses that match what our memories have recorded, our past is recreated anew, reframed by the present. But the heart as the site of memory, still beating at the very center of our word “recorded” (just as we still speak of learning by heart) reminds us that body and memory remain inseparable. The editor of Deuteronomy as well as the final editor of the entire Torah knew how to give us a strong punch line with the Song of Moses, an ending designed to be especially memorable, to find a place in our bodies—ears, hearts and synapses. So what has it fired up in you?